Dealing with talent shadow

J

JensK

Active member
Hello everyone!

As a premise, I'm not at all a lighting guy. I can do a very basic interview setup and thats more or less as far as my talent goes. I usually color grade or edit stuff.

Recently, my job has been looking into doing some very cheap and light setups for some e-learning courses. As I was the only one available who could operate a camera, I took it upon myself to do those. However, I've run into something I'm having difficulty dealing with. We have a very tiny room to shoot in. I can either use the wall as backgrund or some white paper. Trouble is, we're shooting a guy next week who is going through his lecture by putting stickers on the wall. This means we have to use the wall the stickers would make the paper background move around.

This is troublesome for me in terms of lighting. He basically has to stand very close to the wall, and that creates some extremely hard and nasty shadows on the wall on my initial tests. I've not been able to figure out how to deal with this properly.

I have 3 rather small LED panels at my disposal. All three can be dimmed, so I guess that helps somewhat. However, I have no softbox, ring or anything for them.

Now, I will admit that I did not have the LED panels at the proper height when I tested - I reckon they should be well above the lens which they were not. Aside from that, I'm not quite sure which is the best way to go about this. I know I won't be able to completely avoid shadows - I just don't want them be quite as harsh as they are at the moment.

How would you guys go about this?

Cheers! :)
 
Bounce your LED panels on a larger surface. Either a wall or a white reflector so that all light hitting your talent are bounced light. The larger the bounce surface is the smoother shadows will be. Create a good ambient light in the room without any direct light.
 
Osslund said:
Bounce your LED panels on a larger surface. Either a wall or a white reflector so that all light hitting your talent are bounced light. The larger the bounce surface is the smoother shadows will be. Create a good ambient light in the room without any direct light.
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How close to the talent would you recommend that I put the defusers (if thats the right word). They are not awfully powerful, so I'd be a little afraid that I wouldn't get enough light. Not sure how much light I'd actually lose by bouncing it off another source?

I know its a bit of a generalization, as it'll wary obviously. Just trying to get a feel for it.
 
Bounce and spread them out, so in the worst case scenario, shadows are very light.

A maybe look for a cheap diffuser, like baking paper or gauze, and/or just some tin foil as reflectors.*

The non-stick baking tin foil seems to be more reflective too.
 
JensK said:
How close to the talent would you recommend that I put the defusers (if thats the right word). They are not awfully powerful, so I'd be a little afraid that I wouldn't get enough light. Not sure how much light I'd actually lose by bouncing it off another source?

I know its a bit of a generalization, as it'll wary obviously. Just trying to get a feel for it.
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Many cameras these days doesn't need much light to look okay and if hard and ugly shadows can be avoided a boost in post to bring up levels might give a better result than dealing with unflattering direct light. I suggest you set it up in the room and experiment if possible.

If it were me I'd probably use the existing light in the room (ceiling lights) and use a soft key light to put some good exposure on the talent.
 
It sounds as if you don't have access to the proper equipment to achieve the result you want, the same as only having the most basic consumer editing program to edit when you need the features of Adobe Creative Cloud. The suggestions for bouncing or diffusing the light are good, that's what it will take to reduce those shadows. If your LEDs don't have the horsepower to do that, why don't rent some lights that do? The larger the source is relative to the size of the subject, the softer the light and shadows will be. A nice piece of white 3x4 foamcore can be bought for what, $10.00 at Michaels? You can rig it with push pins, an easel or poster holder and try bouncing all of your lights into it. It will be messy, light will go everywhere with lots of spill but it will be a lot softer than the few inches across each of your sources are. By ganging two or three into the foamcore, you may get enough light output? You could also take a few more pieces of foamcore, a razor knife and some tape, along with tracing paper and create your own softbox, that will make a somewhat directional soft light. It's not difficult but takes some time.
 
Light the whole thing with the ceiling - bounce the light from it though you may need to experiment with specific arrangement of how you hit the ceiling (where and how much and from what points) with whatever you have.
 
Is it necessary for you to frame the wall straight-on? If you can come at it at angle, you can create all the depth you want.
 
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